On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Kaunas, on Saturday, 12 May at 3 pm Six chairs books and guest-artist, dancer and choreographer Liza Baliasnaja will host its SIXTH twice monthly Open Reading Group – Clap when you want to! – which is an invitation to read ahead, collectively discuss and support dear bodies of women, of the earthly and the technological, and seek the joy of learning the planetary together.
In this session – READING EXTENDED – participants are invited to attend body and text in a same space. We will work with fragments from Mario Perniola’s „The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic” and Supervert’s „Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish” that in their own way deal with the ideas of corporeal and sensual. In quest to destabilize the functionality of our skeletal and muscular efficiency, we will overlap exercises from somatic practices next to the images from the readings. Thus forming an interlace between theory and possible practice where fictional penetrates the real and changes it a little bit. Through the poetics of the written we will zoom into the porosity of the skin, blur the borders between the sensations of internal and external, intimate and erotic, abstract and concrete.
Inspired by the saying ‘If you can’t read a body, you’ll never finish a book’ from ‘The Great Outdoors’ (graphic novel by Monika Janulevičiūtė and Monika Kalinauskaitė), we believe that learning sensitivity of reading bodies could lead us to reading more or, rather, finding substantially new ways of reading books. This ORG concerns itself both with the critical feminist practices and its legacies, the cosmical and the comical, & material interdependence and suffering from ills of another species, engaging with hybrid thinkers working along the lines of cultural theory, biology, feminist sciences and technology.
PHYSICAL PRACTICES: breathing exercises; touching and being touched ( aka hands on ) READINGS & MATERIALS: Mario Perniola „5.Becoming Extraneous Clothing” from the book „The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic” (Continuum, 2004), Supervert „Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish” (excerpt TBA) Materials will be in English. Conversations might swing between Lithuanian/ English depending on participants’ mood and preferences.
TO SIGNUP AND RECEIVE MATERIALS, please write to info@sixchairsbooks.lt; if the weather permits, the session will be held outside. Participants are kindly asked to come or bring some comfy pants/ shorts / dress etc.
CLAP IF YOU WANT TO! Following session is going to be held on Thursday, May 31, 6 pm (KAH). Guest session. Reading materials will follow shortly!
